Since 1996, when a small on the risks of owning a firearm the CDC’s budget for research on firearms injuries has shrunk to zero.

The result, as we’ve detailed, is that about gun violence 鈥� such as 鈥� remain unanswered.

The , which will be introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) in the House, and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in the Senate, would give the CDC $10 million a year “for the purpose of conducting or supporting research on firearms safety or gun violence prevention.”

“In America, gun violence kills twice as many children as cancer, and yet political grandstanding has halted funding for public health research to understand this crisis,” Maloney said in a statement.

A National Rifle Association spokeswoman called the push for new CDC funding “unethical.”

“The abuse of taxpayer funds for anti-gun political propaganda under the guise of ‘research’ is unethical,” spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen said in a statement to ProPublica. “That is why Congress should stand firm against President Obama’s scheme to undermine a fundamental constitutional right.”

Maloney, who the 1994 assault weapons ban, is a long-time . Earlier this year, she and Markey President Obama to include CDC funding in his proposed 2015 budget, which .

Obama’s proposal has been opposed by key Republicans, and so far, Markey and Maloney’s legislation has not attracted any Republican support. “On the House side, we have over 20 co-sponsors already. We do not have a Republican,” Maloney said at a press conference this morning.

“The President’s request to fund propaganda for his gun-grabbing initiatives though the CDC will not be included in the FY2015 appropriations bill,” Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that traditionally sets CDC funding, last month.

The CDC sponsors a of disease and injury prevention programs, focusing on everything from HIV/AIDS to averting falls by elderly people. Since 2007, the CDC has spent less than $100,000 a year on firearms-focused work, according to a CDC spokeswoman. The money goes not for research but for a , annual estimate of the number of Americans injured by shootings.

The NRA’s director of public affairs told CNN last year that more government-funded gun research is .

“What works to reduce gun violence is to make sure that criminals are prosecuted and those who have been found to be a danger to themselves or others don’t have access to firearms,” Andrew Arulanandam said. “Not to carry out more studies.”

Professional groups that represent doctors, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for more research funding. In a last summer, the associations wrote that “the dearth of gun violence research has contributed to the lack of meaningful progress in reducing firearm injuries,” and noted that “firearm injuries are one of the top three causes of death among youth.”

The CDC is not the only source of federal funding for gun violence research. The Justice Department 鈥� which has funded gun violence prevention studies since the 1980s 鈥� gave to firearms violence projects last year, and is offering as much as in research funding this year.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which invests in medical research each year, last fall for new research projects on gun violence prevention.It’s not yet clear how much money the NIH will devote to the research. The NIH will announce the gun violence projects it will fund in September and December, a spokeswoman said.

A report last year from experts convened by the federally funded outlined the current on reducing gun violence. Among the questions that need answers, according to the report: How often do Americans successfully use guns to protect themselves each year? Could improved “smart gun” technologies reduce gun deaths and injuries, and will consumers be willing to adopt them? And would universal background checks 鈥� the most popular and prominent gun control policy proposal 鈥� actually reduce gun violence?

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The government’s own numbers seem to conflict. One source of data on shooting victims suggests that gun-related violence has been declining for years, while another government estimate actually shows an increase in the number of people who have been shot. Each estimate is based on limited, incomplete data. Not even the FBI tracks the total number of nonfatal gunshot wounds.

“We know how many people die, but not how many are injured and survive,” said Dr. Demetrios Demetriades, a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who has been studying nationwide gunshot injury trends.

While the number of gun murders has decreased in recent years, there’s debate over whether this reflects a drop in the total number of shootings, or an improvement in how many lives emergency room doctors can save.

Doctors and researchers have been advocating for better gun injury data since the late 1980s. But over gun violence research including pressure from congressional Republicans that put an end to some government-funded studies on firearms has meant that we still don’t know about gun violence in America.

“In the absence of real data, politicians and policymakers do what the hell they want,” said Dr. David Livingston, the director of the New Jersey Trauma Center at University Hospital in Newark. “They do what the hell they want anyway,” he added, “but in the absence of data, they have nobody to call them on it.”

An initial push to create a national database of firearm injuries in the late 1980s and early 1990s was over Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for gun research, according to a history of the project written by researchers who worked on it. To make the effort more politically viable, as well as more scientifically rigorous, researchers decided to collect data on all violent deaths, not just firearm deaths.

And to cut costs, they decided to focus only on fatal injuries. Even that more limited effort has languished without full congressional funding. The database currently covers fewer than half of all states.

Most discussions of crime trends in America look back 20 years, to 1993, when violent crime of all kinds hit its peak. Compare 1993 to today, and the : The number of murders is down nearly 50 percent, and other kinds of violent crime have dropped even further.

The Department of Justice has estimates of nonfatal shootings that suggest a similar trend: Its shows a decline, from an average of about 22,000 nonfatal shootings in 2002, to roughly 12,000 a year from 2007 to 2011, according to a Department of Justice statistician.

But over the same time period, CDC estimates show that the number of Americans coming to hospitals with nonfatal, violent gun injuries has actually gone up: from an estimated 37,321 nonfatal gunshot injuries in 2002 to 55,544 in 2011.

The contrast between the two estimates is hard to clear up, since each data source has serious limitations.

Experts say that household data-gathering efforts, like the National Crime Victimization Survey, likely miss the Americans who are most likely to be victims of gun violence.

Shooting victims are “disproportionately young men of color who are living unstable lives and often involved in underground markets or criminal activity, and this is a group that is incredibly difficult to survey,” said Philip Cook, a gun violence expert at Duke University. “A lot of them are in jail at any point in time, or if they’re not in jail, they have no stable address.”

Meanwhile, the CDC numbers are based on a representative sample of 63 hospitals nationwide, and the margin of error for each estimate is very large. The CDC’s best guess for the number of nonfatal intentional shootings in 2012 is somewhere between 27,000 and 91,000.

“Uncertainty in the estimates ,” one group of medical researchers explained in a back-and-forth in a journal on internal medicine last year.

The FBI also gathers data on gun crime from local police departments, but most departments do not track the number of people who are shot and survive. Instead, shootings are counted as part of the broader category of “aggravated assault,” which includes a range of gun-related crimes, from waving a gun threateningly to actually shooting someone.

There were about 140,000 firearm-aggravated assaults nationwide in 2012, according to the FBI’s report. How many of those assaults represent someone actually getting shot? There’s no way to tell.

The lack of a clear number of nonfatal shootings has caused confusion.

A frequently cited 2012 Wall Street Journal attributed the falling murder rate to advances in trauma care: “In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence.” The article based its conclusion that “America has become no less violent” over the past two decades on the CDC’s shooting estimates.

The article did not cite the of gun violence that show down, or the level of uncertainty in the CDC’s own data.

Livingston, the Newark trauma surgeon, said that it’s “very nice” when journalists give trauma surgeons credit for saving more lives. “I think that improvements in trauma care clearly have made a great difference,” he said. “On the other hand, if you don’t know the extent of all of the patients, and all of the data, you can make some erroneous conclusions.”

At University Hospital, which treats the vast majority of shooting victims from Newark and surrounding towns, Livingston and other doctors decided to do their own research.

“It’s easy to count dead people. But counting people who are merely injured? The data was all over the place, and, frankly, terrible,” Livingston said.

In a published early this year, they looked back at their own hospital’s records and logged every gunshot wound patient from 2000 to 2011.

What they found was that the number of patients injured by guns had actually held roughly steady over the past decade. But the injuries were getting worse. The percentage of patients who came in with multiple bullet wounds had increased from only 10 percent in 2001 to 23 percent in 2011. The incidence of brain and spinal cord injuries almost doubled.

And though trauma care has advanced over the past decade, the mortality rate for gunshot wound patients in Newark had actually increased, from 9 percent to 14 percent.

With more severe gunshot injuries came . The researchers estimated the total cost over 10 years for their hospital was at least $115 million and three quarters of that was unreimbursed, which meant that taxpayers ultimately paid the bills.

In total, the hospital had treated an average of 527 patients with intentional violent gunshot injuries each year: “unrelenting violence,” as the researchers termed it.

Are the trends that the Newark researchers observed an anomaly? Or are gunshot wound injuries across the county becoming more severe, as they have at this one hospital? The Newark researchers looked for national data and could not find it.

After the and medical and public health groups collaborated on an with the message, “what we don’t know is killing us” Congress did approve funds to begin building a National Violent Death Reporting System in 2002. The push was inspired by a successful effort to track highway vehicle accidents, which experts say has helped reduce the number of deaths from car crashes.

But until last year, the system had only received enough congressional funding to collect detailed data on deaths in 18 states. Then after the Sandy Hook shootings, Congress approved an additional nearly $8 million for database, though that still isn’t enough to detail violent deaths in all 50 states.

President Obama has asked for enough funding next year to allow the CDC to finally begin to collect violent death data nationwide.

As for tracking the number of Americans who are violently injured and survive, CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard, said simply, that “is something that may be considered in the future.”

Funding a CDC effort to track nonfatal violence is not the only path to getting a better answer. Livingston and Demetriades, the Los Angeles trauma surgeon, suggested that independent medical associations could also help collect national nonfatal gun injury data, supported by government funding, and perhaps by legislation. In order to get a clear picture of gun violence, injury data from hospitals should be combined with local law enforcement data about crimes, they said.

Another solution might be better FBI data. “In my opinion, the FBI’s UniformCrime Reports system should be changed so that it tracks nonfatal gunshot woundings in criminal assaults,” said Daniel Webster, a gun violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

“If the FBI could get local agencies to include nonfatal criminal shootings into its UCR system, you have the capacity to track information that hospitals couldn’t distinguishing domestic shootings, from gang shootings, from robbery shootings.”

An FBI spokesman said that changes in data collection practices could be made through congressional mandate or through the Criminal Justice Information Services Division Advisory Process, which would require buy-in from an advisory board of local, state and national law enforcement representatives.

In the past, changes to UCR data collection methods have been rare, the spokesman said. But several changes have been made in recent years, including , and changing how is collected.

Cook, the Duke University researcher, said that the first step should be to find out why CDC data shows a different trend than other measures, and clarifying whether the ways hospitals collect data or changes in the willingness of patients with minor gunshot wounds to come to the hospital for treatment might explain the disparity.

“We have a variety of other evidence that gun violence is going down,” Cook said. “By Occam’s razor, I’d have to believe that the simplest explanation is that the nonfatal woundings are going down, too.”

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget still lists zero dollars for research on gun violence prevention.

One of the researchers who in the political battle over studying firearms was Dr. Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Wintemute is, by his own count, one of only across the country who have continued to focus full-time on firearms violence.

To keep his research going, Wintemute has donated his own money, as the science journal Nature noted in a last year. As of the end of 2013, he has donated about $1.1 million, according to Kathryn Keyes, a fundraiser at UC Davis’ development office. His work has also continued to get funding from some foundations and the state of California.

We contacted Wintemute to talk about his research, the politics of studying firearms, and how much we really know about whether gun control laws work.

At the end of one of our conversations, Wintemute volunteered that he is also a donor to ProPublica, something the editorial staff had not known. (He and his family’s foundation have donated less than $1,500 over four years.)

Here is the condensed version of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.

What research were you doing when the CDC ended your funding?

We were looking at risk factors for criminal activity among people who had legally purchased handguns. A person can have a misdemeanor rap sheet as long as his arm and still be able to purchase firearms legally in most parts of the country.

In California, there is an archive of handgun transfers. You could draw a random sample of people who purchased handguns and see their overall risk of committing crimes later. We found people who had misdemeanor convictions for nonviolent offenses were to commit violence in the future than people with no criminal records. People who had multiple prior misdemeanor convictions for violent crimes [like simple assault and battery or brandishing a firearm] were 15 times as likely to be arrested down the road for crimes like murder and rape and robbery and aggravated assault.

What happened when the CDC cut off your funding?

As I recall, we were in the middle of our project period. We had the expectation that we would be continuing the funds according to the initial award.

When CDC’s funding went away, some private foundations stepped up. But there was a growing sense that little or nothing was going to be done about the problem, at least at the federal level. Why put your money into this one when Congress won’t be doing anything about it?

When did you start donating your own money to keep your research going, and what does the money support?

There came a point when I decided that the work we do is as important as the work of the other nonprofits to which I gave donations. I decided, I’m going to keep the lights on. I told our small staff 2014 three people besides me 2014 I will make that happen personally if need be.

A million dollars is a lot of money. Where does it come from?

Some of it is gifts from stock that was given to me by my father. He’s a businessman. He ran a small company that did well and that’s done well in his retirement. I didn’t earn that. I’ve always seen myself as the steward of that resource.

Some of it is my cash. It boils down to this: I earn an ER doc’s salary. I lead a very simple life. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I don’t have a television. My rent is $840 a month. It’s easy to save. I don’t drive a fancy car. I don’t go out to eat.

One recent from Harvard researchers found that there were lower gun death rates in states with more restrictive gun laws. The study got a of . But you’ve been of its conclusions. What’s wrong with this kind of analysis?

Almost all the effects they had seen from mortality in the study had to do with suicide. But the laws were largely intended to prevent homicide.

Number two: Correlation is not causation. Rates of gun deaths are lower where rates of gun ownership are lower. That’s true. We know that. It’s also easier to pass laws like this where the rates of gun ownership are lower. There aren’t that many guns around, there isn’t that large a constituency of gun owners.

States with lots of laws have lower firearm death rates, but the fact that two things occur at the same time does not mean that one of those things caused the other.

So is there any evidence that denying people the right to legally purchase guns has an impact on crime?

[In 1991] California began denying people who had been convicted of violent misdemeanors. Our group took advantage of this natural experiment. Everyone in tried to buy a handgun from a licensed seller. One group tried to do it under the terms of the new policy, and their purchases were denied. The other group tried it in the two years before the policy, and their purchases were approved.

The people who got their guns were 25 to 30 percent more likely to be arrested for crimes involving firearms or violence. There was no difference in arrests for crimes that did not involve violence. The difference was specific to the types of crimes the law was supposed to affect.

We also looked at denial for felons and found the same effect. Felons who were denied had a lower risk of being arrested for crimes of violence down the road than were people with felony arrests who were able to purchase their guns.

So do we know whether background checks for all purchases 2014 as President Obama has proposed 2014 would actually prevent violence?

There are not hard data on whether universal background checks work better than what we have at the moment. But there’s lots of suggestive evidence.

One piece of that evidence we have comes from the state of Missouri, a new . Missouri had universal background checks and repealed them. In very short order, there was evidence of increasing gun trafficking. The guns that were recovered after use in crime were getting newer. The inference was it was much easier for people to acquire guns for criminal purposes.

You are planning a broad study about whether comprehensive background checks work. What will that research look like?

Six states 2014 Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and New York 2014 have just adopted comprehensive background checks, and they’ve all taken effect already. The provisions of their laws vary, and they started from different places.

The intent of our study is to come as close as possible to determining whether there is a causal relationship between comprehensive background check policies and important measures like crime and mortality.

Do you think there’s any chance the CDC will get new funding to resume gun violence research?

I think hell will freeze over before this Congress gives them money. The good news is that funding from other sources is starting to pick up. The National Institute of Health 2014 it’s the first time in their history that they have issued a formal program announcement, a request for

The NRA has been critical of your work, and says you’re funded by anti-gun groups.

I won’t take money from advocacy organizations.

So, what groups would be on that list?

The National Rifle Association, The Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Brady Campaign, Moms Demand Actions, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Have you ever accepted funding from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg?

I have not.

How do you draw the line between nonprofits whose funding you do accept, and “advocacy organizations”?

I’ve been offered money to do studies where the conclusion was basically determined from the design of the study. It wasn’t really science. The organization that was offering to fund the study was also going to control the interpretation of what the analysis meant. They were going to make the decision of whether or not the study got published. As a scientist, I just can’t enter into such an agreement. We have to let people know what the truth is, even if the truth makes someone uncomfortable.

Has your research ever made gun control advocates uncomfortable?

I did a . When I started crunching numbers on gun show sales, and looking at the surveys, I came to realize 2014 as interesting as this is, gun shows themselves are not a big part of the problem. I felt obligated to add this into my report.

Before we released the study, I had a conference call with a bunch of organizations that I knew were interested in working to close the gun show loophole, and I told them what we were saying. That was a very uncomfortable conversation. People got very angry. It was going to make it more difficult for them to do what they wanted, which was to close the gun show loophole.

You recently did a large . What was the most interesting finding?

We learned that a majority 2014 not a large majority, but a majority 2014 of gun dealers and pawn brokers are in favor of comprehensive background checks.

Do you know why some dealers supported background checks and others didn’t?

There is a sense in the country that retailers who have lots of traced guns [i.e. guns that show up at crime scenes] are themselves bad guys, and I just don’t believe that is always the case.

Retailers who had higher frequencies of attempted straw purchases, higher frequencies of attempted off-the-books-purchases, were more in favor of comprehensive background checks. They’re in the business. They know that when they say “no” to somebody, that guy is just going to go somewhere else to someone who says, “yes,” and they don’t want it to happen. They said “no,” so they want the system to say, “No.”

One of the policy proposals you’ve been looking at is whether people with a history of alcohol abuse should also be banned from purchasing firearms. Is this ever going to be a realistic policy 2014 that two DUIs could mean that someone could lose their legal right to buy guns?

Yes. Last year, I floated the idea to the California legislature, and the legislature passed it. The governor , or we’d have it now. His veto message said there’s not enough evidence. There’s tons of evidence of alcohol as a risk factor of violent activity. I think he meant evidence specific to gun owners. We’ve started one study, and are in the process of another. We’ll come back with the evidence.

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So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases.

They just didn’t know how many: Fully of the patients they examined 鈥� and more than half of gunshot-wound victims 鈥� had signs of PTSD.

“We knew these people were going to have PTSD symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be as extensive.”

What the work showed, Joseph said, is, “This is a much more urgent problem than you think.”

Joseph proposed spending about $200,000 a year to add staffers to screen all at-risk patients for PTSD and connect them with treatment. The taxpayer-subsidized hospital has an annual budget of roughly $450 million. But Joseph said hospital administrators turned her down and suggested she look for outside funding.

“Right now, we don’t have institutional support,” said Joseph, who is now applying for outside grants.

A hospital spokeswoman would not comment on why the hospital decided not to pay for regular screening. The hospital is part of a pilot program with other area hospitals to help “pediatrics patients identified with PTSD,” said the spokeswoman, Marisa Kollias.”The Cook County Health and Hospitals System is committed to treating all patients with high quality care.”

Right now, social workers try to identify patients with the most severe PTSD symptoms, said Carol Reese, the trauma center’s violence prevention coordinator and an Episcopal priest.

“I’m not going to tell you we have everything we need in place right now, because we don’t,” Reese said. “We have a chaplain and a social worker and a couple of social work interns trying to see 5,000 people. We’re not staffed to do it.” 

A growing body of research shows that Americans with traumatic injuries develop PTSD at rates comparable to veterans of war. Just like veterans, civilians can suffer flashbacks, nightmares, paranoia, and social withdrawal. While the United States has been slow to provide adequate treatment to troops affected by post-traumatic stress, the military has made substantial progress in recent years. It now regularly screens for PTSD, works to fight the stigma associated with mental health treatment and educates military families about potential symptoms.

Few similar efforts exist for civilian trauma victims. Americans wounded in their own neighborhoods are not getting treatment for PTSD. They’re not even getting diagnosed.

Studies show that, overall, of Americans suffer from PTSD at some point in their lives. But the rates appear to be much higher in communities 鈥� such as poor, largely African-American pockets of Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia 鈥� where have persisted despite a national decline.

Researchers in Atlanta interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents and found that about two-thirds said they had been violently attacked and that half knew someone who had been murdered. At least 1 in 3 of those interviewed experienced symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives 鈥� and that’s a “conservative estimate,” said Dr. Kerry Ressler, the lead investigator on .

“The rates of PTSD we see are as high or higher than Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam veterans,” Ressler said. “We have a whole population who is traumatized.”

Post-traumatic stress can be a serious burden: It can take a toll on relationships and parenting, lead to family conflict and interfere with jobs. A of patients with traumatic injuries found that those who developed post-traumatic stress were less likely to have returned to work a year after their injuries.

It may also have a broader social cost.  “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” Ressler and his co-authors concluded in a .

For most people, untreated PTSD will not lead to violence. But   “there’s a subgroup of people who are at risk, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, of reacting in a violent way or an aggressive way, that they might not have if they had had their PTSD treated,” Ressler said.

has found that the symptom of “chronic hyperarousal” 鈥� the distorted sense of always being under extreme threat 鈥� can lead to increased aggression and violent behavior.

“Very minor threats can be experienced, by what the signals in your body tell you, as, 鈥榊ou’re in acute danger,’ ” said Sandra Bloom, a psychiatrist and former president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Another issue, wrote researchers at Drexel University, is that people with symptoms of PTSD may be in order to “restore feelings of safety.”

Hospital trauma centers, which work on the front lines of neighborhood violence, could help address the lack of treatment. Indeed, the American College of Surgeons, which sets standards for the care of patients with traumatic injuries, is set to recommend that trauma centers”evaluate, support and treat” patients for post-traumatic stress.

But it’s not a requirement, and few hospitals appear to be doing it.

ProPublica surveyed a top-level trauma center in each of the 22 cities with the nation’s highest homicide rates. Just one, the Spirit of Charity Trauma Center in New Orleans, currently screens all seriously injured patients for PTSD. At another, Detroit Receiving Hospital, psychologists talk with injured crime victims about PTSD.  

Other hospitals have a patchwork of resources or none at all. At two hospitals, in Birmingham, Alabama and St. Louis, Missouri, trauma center staff said they hope to institute routine PTSD screening by the end of the year.

Doctors in Baltimore, Newark, Memphis, and Jackson, Miss., said they wanted to do more to address PTSD, but they do not have the money.  

They said adding even small amounts to hospital budgets is a hard sell in a tough economic climate. That’s especially true at often-cash-strapped public hospitals.

In order to add a staff member to screen and follow up on PTSD, “Do I lay someone else off in another area?” asked Carnell Cooper, a trauma surgeon at Maryland Shock Trauma in Baltimore.

Many public hospitals rely on state Medicaid programs to cover treatment of low-income patients. But several surgeons across the country said they did not know of any way they could bill Medicaid for screenings.

The federal government often provides guidance to state Medicaid programs on best practices for patient care and how to fund them. But a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the agency has given states no guidance on whether or how hospitals could be reimbursed for PTSD screenings.

Hospitals are often unwilling to foot the bill themselves.

Trauma surgeons and their staffs expressed frustration that they know PTSD is having a serious impact on their patients, but they can’t find a way to pay for the help they need.

“We don’t recognize that people have PTSD. We don’t recognize that they’re not doing their job as well, that they’re not doing as well in school, that they’re getting irritable at home with their families,” said John Porter, a trauma surgeon in Jackson, Miss., which has a per-capita homicide rate higher than Chicago’s.

“When you think about it, if someone gets shot, and I save their life, and they can’t go out and function, did I technically save their life? Probably not.”

When RAND Corp. researchers began interviewing violently injured young men in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, they faced some skepticism that the men, often connected to gangs, would be susceptible to PTSD.

“We had people tell us that we’d see a lot of people who were gang-bangers, and they wouldn’t develop PTSD, because they were already hardened to that kind of life,” said Grant Marshall, a behavioral scientist who studied patients at a Los Angeles trauma center. “We didn’t find that to be the case at all. People in gangs were just as likely as anyone else to develop PTSD.”

In fact, trauma appears to have a cumulative effect. Young men with violent injuries may be more likely to develop symptoms if they have been .

The Los Angeles study found that interviewed three months after they were injured had symptoms consistent with PTSD.

“Most people still think that all the people who get shot were doing something they didn’t need to be doing,” said Porter, the trauma surgeon from Jackson, Miss. “I’m not saying it’s the racist thing, but everybody thinks it’s a young black men’s disease: They get shot, they’re out selling drugs. We’re not going to spend more time on them.”

While post-traumatic stress often does not show up until several months after an injury, experts say many trauma centers are missing the chance to evaluate patients early for risk of PTSD and to use clinical follow-ups 鈥� when patients come back to have their physical wounds examined 鈥� to check if patients are developing symptoms.

Doctors say hospitals are unlikely to make significant progress until the American College of Surgeons makes systematic PTSD screening a requirement for all top-level trauma centers.

An ACS requirement would be “a much better hammer to show the administration,” said Michael Foreman, chief of trauma surgery at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Baylor, one of the few trauma centers to have a full-time psychologist on staff, and found that roughly a quarter experienced post-traumatic stress. But Foreman said the center would not systematically screen all its patients until the ACS mandates it.

It’s not clear when that will happen. The organization’s recognition of PTSD screening as a recommended practice is a first step. Those new guidelines will be released in March 2014, according to Chris Cribari, who chairs the subcommittee that evaluates whether hospitals are meeting ACS standards. Cribari declined to say when PTSD screening might become a requirement. He said the timing will depend on what hurdles hospitals encounter 鈥� such as patient privacy 鈥� when some of them start screenings.

Cribari acknowledged that at some hospitals, “unless it’s a regulation, they’re not going to spend the money on it.”

At minimum, experts say, hospitals should provide all trauma patients with basic education about post-traumatic stress.

“The number one thing we do,” is simply “tell everybody in the trauma center about PTSD,” said John Nanney, a Department of Veterans Affairs researcher who developed a program for violently injured patients at the Spirit of Charity in New Orleans.

Without education about symptoms, patients who have flashbacks or constant nightmares may have “these catastrophic beliefs” about what is happening to them, Nanney said. “Just say, 鈥楾his is something you might notice. If you do notice it, it doesn’t mean you’re going crazy. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. This is something that happens鈥攄on’t freak out.’ “

The city of Philadelphia has begun to focus on trauma as a major public health issue. Philadelphia is working with local mental health providers to screen for PTSD more systematically 鈥� and to focus on post-traumatic stress as part of drug and alcohol treatment. The city has also paid to train local therapists in prolonged exposure, a proven treatment for PTSD鈥� the same kind of training the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has paid for its therapists to receive.

For violently injured Philadelphia residents, there’s also Drexel University’s Healing Hurt People, a program that’s become a national model for addressing trauma and PTSD.

Healing Hurt People reaches out to violently injured adults and children at two local hospitals and offers them intensive services. The program accepts a broad range of patients 鈥� from high-schoolers to siblings of young men who have been shot to former drug dealers. (One of Healing Hurt People’s clients talked about his post-traumatic stress in 2013 on .)

The program’s social workers screen all clients for PTSD symptoms and host discussions in which clients can share their experiences with one another. It’s a way of fighting stigma around mental-health symptoms. Instead of thinking that they’re going crazy, the conversations help them realize, “OK, this is normal,” as one client put it.

One of the program’s central goals is to discourage victims of crimes from retaliating against their attackers and to help them focus on staying safe and rebuilding their own lives.

The program’s therapists and social workers remind clients that the aftereffects of trauma may make them overreact and help them plan how to identify and avoid events that might trigger them. In one discussion last fall, a therapist sketched a cliff on a whiteboard, with a stick man on the top, close to the edge. The question: How do you recognize when you’re getting close to the cliff edge鈥攁nd learn to walk away?

“Our thing is education,” social worker Tony Thompson said. The more clients “understand what’s going on in their body and their mind, the more prepared they are to deal with it.”

Intensive casework like this has shown good results, but it’s not cheap. Healing Hurt People is relatively small: Its programs served 129 new clients in 2013 and offered briefer education or assistance to a few hundred more. Its annual budget in 2013 was roughly $300,000, not including the cost of the office space that Drexel donates to the program.

Other researchers have been working to develop quicker, more modest interventions for PTSD, including some that use laptops and smartphones鈥攑rograms that could easily be extended to more patients and still have some positive effect.

Whatever the approach, there “is untapped potential,” said Joseph, the surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. Healing Hurt People is a model for what she wants to create. “These are kids, for the most part. When a 17-year-old kid crashes their parents’ car, and they were drinking, we don’t say, 鈥極h, that kid’s hopeless, let’s just give up on them.’ “

“We’ve certainly had decades of trying to apply political solutions and social solutions to our inner cities’ financial problems and violence problem, and they haven’t been successful,” said Ressler, the Atlanta researcher. “If we could do a better job of identification, intervention and treatment, I think there would be less violence, and people would have an easier time doing well in school, getting a job.” 

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Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at these so-called data brokers 鈥� and are beginning to push the companies to give consumers over what happens to their data.

But many people still don’t even know that .

Here’s a look at what we know about the consumer data industry.

How much do these companies know about individual people?

They start with the basics, like names, addresses and contact information, and add on demographics, like age, race, occupation and “education level,” according to consumer data firm Acxiom’s .

But that’s just the beginning: The companies collect lists of people experiencing “” like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college 鈥� or even getting divorced.

Credit reporting giant has a separate , which sells lists of “names of expectant parents and families with newborns” that are “.”

The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who ? can sell you that, as well as a list of people who donate to .

A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax even for roughly of employed Americans, as NBC news reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets the information directly from employers.

Equifax said in a statement that the information is only sold to customers “who have been verified through a detailed credentialing process.” It added that if a mortgage company or other lender wants to access information about your salary, they must obtain your permission to do so.

Of course, data companies typically don’t have all of this information on any one person. As Acxiom notes in its overview, “No individual record ever contains all the possible data.” And some of the data these companies sell is really just a guess about your background or preferences, based on the characteristics of your neighborhood, or other people in a similar age or demographic group.

Where are they getting all this info?

The stores where you shop sell it to them.

Datalogix, for instance, which collects information from , says it has information on more than $1 trillion in consumer spending “.” It doesn’t say which ones. (Datalogix did not respond to our requests for comment.)

Data companies usually exactly what companies sell them information, citing competitive reasons. And retailers also don’t make it easy for you to find out whether they’re selling your information.

But thanks to , researchers at U.C. Berkeley were able to get a small glimpse of . The recruited volunteers to ask more than 80 companies how the volunteers’ information was being shared.

Only two companies actually responded with details about how volunteers’ information had been shared. Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent “your name, address and what you purchased” to seven other companies, including a data “cooperative” that allows retailers to , and another company that later became . (Restoration Hardware hasn’t responded to our request for comment.)

Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information: not just a person’s name and address and what they purchased, but their age, occupation, and the number, age and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data, among them companies owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others, including Honda, HarperCollins Publishing, Almay cosmetics, and yogurt company Dannon.

But Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said that Disney’s letter, sent in 2007, “wasn’t clear” about how the data was actually shared with different companies on the list. Outside companies like Honda only received personal information as part of a contest, sweepstakes, or other joint promotion that they had done with Disney, Mucha said. The data was shared “for the fulfillment of that contest prize, not for their own marketing purposes.”

Where else do data brokers get information about me?

Government records and other publicly available information, including some sources that may surprise you. Your state Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, 鈥� like your name, address, and the type of vehicles you own 鈥� to data companies, although only for certain permitted purposes, including .

Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be in some states.

Are there limits to the kinds of data these companies can buy and sell?

Yes, certain kinds of sensitive data are protected 鈥� but much of your information can be bought and sold without any input from you.

Federal law protects the and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine , or your eligibility for employment, insurance and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you.

Other than certain kinds of protected data 鈥� including medical records and data used for credit reports 鈥� consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, “There are requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes.”

So they don’t sell information about my health?

Actually, they do.

Data companies can capture information about your “interests” in certain health conditions based on what you buy 鈥� or what you search for online. Datalogix has lists of people classified as Acxiom sells data on whether an individual has an “online search propensity” for a certain “ailment or prescription.”

Consumer data is also beginning to be used to evaluate whether you’re making healthy choices.

One recently bought data on more than three million people’s consumer purchases in order to flag , like purchasing plus-sized clothing, the Wall Street Journal reported. (The company bought purchasing information for current plan members, not as part of screening people for potential coverage.)

Spokeswoman Michelle Douglas said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina would use the data to target free programming offers to their customers.

Douglas suggested that it might be more valuable for companies to use consumer data “to determine ways to help me improve my health” rather than “to buy my data to send me pre-paid credit card applications or catalogs full of stuff they want me to buy.”

Do companies collect information about my social media profiles and what I do online?

Yes.

As we, some data companies record 鈥� and then resell 鈥� all kinds of information you post online, including your screen names, website addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.

Acxiom said it collects information about individual people use, and “whether they are a heavy or a light user,” but that they do not collect information about “individual postings” or your “lists of friends.”

More traditional consumer data can also be connected with information about what you do online. Datalogix, the company that collects loyalty card data, has partnered with Facebook to track whether Facebook users who see ads for certain products , as the Financial Times reported last year.

Is there a way to find out exactly what these data companies know about me?

Not really.

You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there’s often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name 鈥� or whether it’s accurate.

Most companies offer, at best, a partial picture.

While Acxiom lets consumers the company sells about them, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer that only a sliver of information is shared, including whether you have a prison record or bankruptcy filings.

When Singer finally received her report, all it included was a .

Some companies do offer more access. A spokeswoman for Epsilon said it allows consumers to review “high level information” about their data 鈥� like whether or not you’re listed as making a purchase in the “home furnishings” category. (Requests to review this information cost $5 and can only be made .)

RapLeaf, a company that advertises that it has “real-time data” on , says that it gives customers “ over the data we have on you,” and allows them to review and edit the categories (like “estimated household income” and “Likely Political Contributor to Republicans”) that RapLeaf has connected with their email addresses.

How do I know when someone has purchased data about me?

Most of the time, you don’t.

When you’re checking out at a store and a cashier asks you for your Zip code, the store isn’t just getting that single piece of information. Acxiom and other data companies offer services that allow stores to use your Zip code and the name on your credit card to 鈥� without asking you for it directly.

Is there any way to stop the companies from collecting and sharing information about me?

Yes, but it would require a whole lot of work.

Many data brokers offer consumers the chance to “” of being included in their databases, or at least from . Rapleaf, for instance, has a “Permanent opt-out” that “ associated with your email address from the Rapleaf database.”

But to actually opt-out effectively, you need to know about all the different data brokers and where to find their opt-outs. Most consumers, of course, don’t have that information.

In their privacy report last year, the FTC suggested that data brokers should create that would make it easier for consumers to learn about the existence of these companies and their rights regarding the data they collect.

How many people do these companies have information on?

Basically everyone in the U.S. and many beyond it. Acxiom, recently , says it has information on , including “nearly every U.S. consumer.”

After the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported, Acxiom was able to locate .

How is all of this data actually used?

Mostly to sell you stuff. Companies want to buy lists of people who might be interested in what they’re selling 鈥� and also want to learn more about their current customers.

They also sell their information for other purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and background checks.

If new privacy laws are passed, will they include the right to see what data these companies have collected about me?

Unlikely.

In a report on privacy last year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that “that would provide consumers with access to information about them held by a data broker.” President Barack Obama has also proposed a that would give consumers the right to access and correct certain information about them.

But this probably won’t include access to marketing data, which the Federal Trade Commission considers less sensitive than data used for credit reports or identity verification.

In terms of marketing data, “we think at the very least consumers should have access to the general categories of data the companies have about consumers,” said Maneesha Mithal of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.

Data companies have also pushed back against the idea of opening up marketing profiles for individual consumers’ inspection.

Even if there were errors in your marketing data profile, “the worst thing that could happen is that you get an advertising offer that isn’t relevant to you,” said Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

“The fraud and security risks that you run by opening up those files is higher than any potential harm that could happen to the consumer,” Thomas said.

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In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs.

Then they feed the information into a state Democratic Party database that includes nearly every voter in Minnesota.

Some of the states’ few dozen data volunteers are so devoted that they log into the party database daily from their home computers. Deb Pitzrick, 61, of Eden Prairie, convinced a group of her friends to form the “Grandma Brigade.” These women, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, no longer want to knock on doors for the Democrats. Instead, they support the party by gathering public information about other voters.

Much of the data the Grandma Brigade collects is prosaic: records of campaign donations or voters who have recently died. But a few volunteers see free information everywhere. They browse the listings of names on Tea Party websites. They might add a record of what was said around the family Thanksgiving table 鈥� Uncle Mitch voted for Bachmann, cousin Alice supports gay marriage.

One data volunteer even joked about holding “rat out your neighbor parties,” where friends would be encouraged to add notes about the political views of other people on their block.

Once information about individual people is entered into the state party’s database, it doesn’t stay in Minnesota. Almost all the information collected by local volunteers like the Grandma Brigade also ends up in the party’s central database in Washington.

Few places have data volunteers as dedicated as the ones in Minnesota, which has been held up as a model for other state Democratic parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have centralized databases that, among other things, track opinions you share with local campaign volunteers.

Each piece of information the parties have stored about you might not be too interesting on its own. But taken together, they’re incredibly powerful. Political campaigns are using this voter data to predict voters’ behavior in ways.

“People say that campaigns are more art than science. They’re wrong,” said Ken Martin, the chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

“We’re pretty sure, when we pull you up on a file, which way you’re going to vote,” he said. “It’s a little scary. A little big brother.”

Voters themselves have no way to know what data politicians have collected about them, or how campaigns are using or sharing that information. Indeed, the same politicians who are pushing for more transparency about the workings of the commercial data industry 鈥� including President Barack Obama 鈥� have said nothing about the information that political campaigns collect.

Both political parties treat their data operations as and will not even reveal exactly what kinds of information about voters are stored in their databases.

At times, politicians are assembling data that has no obvious application. With technology evolving, this information could be valuable in the future.

“A lot of it you just have to collect in good faith that later there will be some place it will apply,” said Sarah Black, the Minnesota DFL voter file manager.

The Grandma Brigade’s Pitzrick said she doesn’t think the publicly available data that she and other volunteers are collecting raises privacy concerns.

“Is it any different than having Best Buy have it for you?” she asked. “It’s out there.”

Political parties can use the data they collect to look at how individual voters’ opinions and loyalties change over time.

In Virginia, a typical profile in the Democratic Party’s database includes notes from the dozens of times campaigns have contacted a given voter since 2001, including which candidates the voter has supported over the years, and whether they were Democrats or Republicans, according to Brenner Tobe, the party’s director of information and technology.

By the 2016 presidential race, Virginia Democrats will have recorded 15 years’ worth of interactions with some voters.

Minnesota’s data goes back even further, thanks to an early investment in a computerized data system in the 1980s.

“The pool of people we don’t know something about gets smaller and smaller,” Black, the voter file manager, said.

During this past election cycle, Democratic volunteers in Minnesota had one million new conversations with voters, which translated into at least one million new pieces of information about individual voters, Black said.

Democrats in Virginia and Minnesota collect a lot of data out of necessity, since voters in those states do not publicly register with a political party. There’s no easy way to tell Democratic voters from Republican voters unless the party saves information about them.

A Democratic data firm showed last summer that the party was able to clearly distinguish supporters from opponents despite having no information about voters’ party registration.

The amount of information politicians have about individual voters varies state-by-state. Each state party makes its own data rules, and some local candidates are more willing to share their information than others. Swing states 鈥� which see a regular influx of national money and volunteers 鈥� tend to have more information than safe states.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have pushed hard over the last decade to train volunteers to use their party’s databases. A decade ago, the Republican National Committee was sending staffers with crates of laptops to Republican events across the country, with the goal of training local activists to use the party’s “Voter Vault” database, according to interviews with former RNC staffers. Volunteers were encouraged to bring in their address books, look up their friends in the database, and update their contact information, said Serenety Hanley, who worked on the project.

Much of the coverage of President Obama’s focused on the and working out of the campaign’s offices in Chicago 鈥� and the for their party to adopt similar data-focused .

But Democratic insiders say that their party’s data advantage comes from their strong network of on-the-ground volunteers 鈥� something that may be harder to replicate than hiring an office of data scientists.

Pitzrick, the founder of Minnesota’s Grandma Brigade, came to political activism in 2003 from a background in marketing, and was shocked at the poor quality of the Democratic Party’s information. One local volunteer she knew went to interview a voter on her list, only to find his family holding a wake.

So, Pitzrick started flipping to the newspaper obituary page over her morning cup of coffee, and updating the voter database in her local state senate district. These days, she said, she finds it more efficient to open up local entries on Legacy.com.

One of Pitzrick’s friends, 76-year-old Fran Merriman, a former high school American history and government teacher, tracks the public records of voters moving in and out of the area 鈥� something that’s a lot of fun, she quips, for a “nosy old lady.”

“Every time we send out mailers and it comes back, we’ve wasted 44 cents,” Merriman said. Updating the database, she said, is “like contributing money” to the party.

“I’m sure some place across the country there are a lot of other seniors citizens who could do this kind of work,” she said.

The Federal Trade Commission recently asked nine large data companies to clarify what commercial data companies 鈥� and whether consumers have the right to opt-out. Earlier this year, several members of Congress asked data companies .

President Barack Obama himself released a , focused on online data collection, last February, which suggested that consumers “have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.” The president said he would push for legislation to back up consumers’ privacy rights.

But the administration has been silent on what if any rights voters should have regarding the data gathered about them.

Asked about this issue last year, a White House spokesperson would only say that the Privacy Bill of Rights “applies to how businesses handle consumers’ personal data online, and will impact all organizations using personal information collected through commercial means,” including campaigns.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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Across the country, companies are using cookies to tailor the political ads you see online. One of the firms is CampaignGrid, which boasted in a recent slideshow, “Internet Users are No Longer Anonymous.” The slideshow includes an image of the famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Next to it, CampaignGrid lists what it can now know about an Internet user: “Lives in Pennsylvania’s 13th Congressional District, 19002 zip code, Registered primary voting Republican, High net worth household, Age 50-54, Teenagers in the home, Technology professional, Interested in politics, Shopping for a car, Planning a vacation in Puerto Rico.”

The slideshow was online until last week, when the company removed it after we asked for comment. (Here is the .) Rich Masterson, CampaignGrid’s chairman, wrote in an email that the slideshow was posted in error: “It was an unapproved version of a sales deck that was posted by an intern who no longer works for the company.”

CampaignGrid does indeed collect 18 different “attributes” for every voter, Masterson told ProPublica, including age, gender, political donations, and more. Campaigns use this data to tailor the online ads you see.

Online targeting has taken off this campaign season. ProPublica has identified seven companies that advertise the ability to help campaigns target specific voters online. Among them is , the credit reporting company. Datalogix, a company that to track users’ buying patterns, is also involved. (Here are marketing materials and comment from ). CampaignGrid and have been for their . Yet the scale of the targeting and the number of companies involved has received little notice.

Few of the companies involved in the targeting . But CampaignGrid, which works with Republicans, and a similar, Democratic firm, Precision Network, told ProPublica they have political information on 150 million American Internet users, or roughly 80 percent of the nation’s registered voters.

The information 鈥� stripped of your name or address 鈥� is connected to your computer via a cookie. Targeting firms say replacing your name with an ID number keeps the process anonymous and protects users’ privacy.

But privacy experts say that assembling information about Internet users’ political behavior can be problematic even if voters’ names aren’t attached.

“A lot of people would consider their political identity more private than lots of information,” said William McGeveran, a data privacy expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. “We make more rules about medical privacy. We make more rules about financial privacy. So if you think private political beliefs are in that category, maybe you’re concerned about having them treated like your favorite brand of toothpaste.”

Google has stayed away from this kind of targeting. It classifies political beliefs as “,” in the same category as medical information and religious beliefs.

But other big players have embraced the “,” as one company branded it.

As we reported in June, sell access to your registration information for political targeting. That’s one way CampaignGrid and other companies find you online. Political targeting firms say they also work with other websites, but would not name them.

While campaigns and the firms working with them can buy , voters have been left mostly in the dark.

Many online ad companies mark targeted ads with a small blue triangle symbol, or the phrase “Ad Choices,” and offer surfers a chance to . But even if web users know what the triangle means, they get no information about how or why they were targeted.

“Consumers don’t really understand what’s going on and haven’t given their permission,” says Joseph Turow, a digital marketing and privacy expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

There are few legal regulations governing how online targeting works, or what notification consumers must receive.

Online advertising experts point out that individual voting records are public information and have long been used to target voters through direct mail. And targeting companies say they are offering a valuable service. Instead of seeing random ads, users get to see ads from candidates they might actually want to support.

“We empower voters,” Jeff Dittus, co-founder of Campaign Grid and now head of , wrote in an email. “We give voters information that is meaningful to them and helps them make choices.”

Stuart Ingis, a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry group, said that voter file targeting is a First Amendment issue, and that targeting should be protected as part of political speech.

“These technologies provide a method for politicians inexpensively to improve our democracy,” he said. “I would say that the founding fathers firmly believed in the ability 鈥� I think our society very much values the ability 鈥� to efficiently reach a desired audience with a political message.”

Not everyone seems to agree. A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School found that ,” and that 77 percent would not return to a website if they knew it “was sharing information about me with political advertisers.”

While targeting firms promise a wealth of individual detail, it’s hard to know how much information most campaigns are actually using.

“The more third-party data providers you use, the smaller the universe of people who you can reach becomes,” CampaignGrid’s Masterson said. “Republican women 25-34 who drive SUVs and have American Express cards, and go to the theater once a month 鈥� that might be four people.”

One place online voter targeting has been used successfully is in the state senate primary race of Morgan McGarvey, a Kentucky Democrat who faced off against three other Democratic candidates this May.

With four liberal candidates competing for a liberal district, McGarvey told ProPublica, he needed to convince the small number of voters who would turn out in the primary that they should vote for him.

His campaign worked with Precision Network to show online McGarvey ads to local voters under 35, and to female Democrats who had voted in at least three of the past five primary elections. (Two of his challengers were women.)

“When every dollar counts, when literally every vote counts, you have to be more targeted,” he said.

“I do think it helped us win.”

McGarvey is now running unopposed in the November election.

Have you seen a targeted political ad?

Help us find out how politicians are .

1. If you spot a small blue triangle icon on any online political ad, or the words “Ad Choices,” take a screenshot of the ad.

2. Then click on the blue triangle or the words “Ad Choices” to find out which company showed you the ad. Take a screenshot of that, too.

3. Email the screenshots to us at targeting2012@propublica.org. Please include the full URL of the page where you saw the ad.

If the ad asks you to “learn more,” visit a website, donate, or sign a petition, please send us a screenshot of that site or petition, as well. (The page where the ad sends you may also be targeted to what advertisers know about you.)

Not sure how to take a screenshot? Here are the instructions if you’re , , or .

The post How Companies Have Assembled Political Profiles for Millions of Internet Users appeared first on 天美视频.

Lauren Berns was browsing Talking Points Memo when he saw an ad with President Obama鈥檚 face. 鈥淪top the Reckless Spending,鈥� the ad read, and in smaller print, Paid for by Crossroads GPS. Berns was surprised. Why was Crossroads GPS, a group that powerful Republican strategist Karl Rove helped found,advertising on a liberal-leaning political website? Looking closely at the ad, Berns saw a small blue triangle in the upper-left hand corner. He knew what that meant: this ad wasn鈥檛 being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year鈥檚 election. They鈥檙e often called 鈥溾�� groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and .

These groups are on television spots attacking different candidates. These ads are often highly publicized and get plenty of media attention.

But these same dark money groups are also quietly expanding their online advertising efforts, using sophisticated targeting tactics to send their ads to specific kinds of people.

Who they’re targeting, and what data they’re using, is secret.

Online advertising companies have amassed vast quantities of information on what individual people read, watch, and do on the Internet. They collect this data using small files called cookies, which allows them to track Internet users as they move from site to site.

These anonymous profiles of information are used to customize advertisements鈥攍ike sending casino ads to someone who just bought a plane ticket to Vegas.

But these profiles are also increasingly used by political groups, which can decide which people to target with a message鈥攁nd which people to avoid鈥攂ased on the kinds of articles they read and the kinds of sites they visit.

Many Internet users who see these ads may not be aware they鈥檙e being targeted.

As , both the and campaigns are using advanced tracking and targeting tactics. Working with our readers, we found two examples of dark money groups using this kind of targeting, as well: one ad from Crossroads GPS and one ad from Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit linked to the politically influential Koch brothers.

How many of these ads are dark money groups sending out? It鈥檚 hard to say, because it鈥檚 not easy to track exactly how much Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, and similar groups are spending on different kinds of advertising.

But these politically influential organizations are moving more of their efforts online.

While Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio said he couldn鈥檛 get into the specifics of their budget, 鈥淐rossroads will certainly spend more in the online space in 2012 than it did in 2010,鈥� he said.

Americans for Prosperity did not return multiple requests for comment.

Even when Internet users are sophisticated enough to spot a targeted ad, as Lauren Berns did, it is almost impossible for them to find out why a certain organization is targeting them鈥攐r what data about them is being used.

Berns, for instance, is a registered independent from St. Petersburg, Florida鈥攅xactly the kind of voter whose opinion campaigns and political groups are trying to sway before November. He鈥檚 a self-described 鈥渘ews junkie,鈥� who reads both liberal and conservative news sites and posts articles to Facebook two to ten times a day. But it wasn鈥檛 clear what part of his Internet behavior ad triggered the Crossroads ad鈥攐r whether information about his offline life was part of the targeting formula. Had he been shown the Crossroads ad because he had visited Mitt Romney鈥檚 site? Because he regularly reads the conservative sites of The Daily Caller and The Weekly Standard? Because he lives in a swing state? Did Berns fit the profile of a potential Crossroads supporter because he鈥檚 a 44-year-old who travels regularly? Or because he shares things with his friends, thus making him a potential 鈥渟ocial influencer?鈥�

A popup message accompanying the ad offered information about the targeting. But it only explained, 鈥淲e select ads we believe might be more relevant to your interests.鈥�

The popup in the ad Berns received.

When we sent Crossroad鈥檚 Collegio a copy of the ad, he said he could not explain exactly how the ad had been targeted, saying, 鈥渋t鈥檚 a matter of strategy that we would hold close to our chests.鈥�

But he did offer one potential targeting factor. 鈥淲e are looking for viewers who are more likely to engage their lawmakers in an issue advocacy campaign, and those are generally viewers who visit news and current affairs websites,鈥� Collegio said. If Crossroads GPS was looking to target news junkies, then Berns was the kind of person they were trying to reach鈥攁lthough, of course, that didn鈥檛 necessarily mean he was sympathetic to the ad鈥檚 message. Berns regularly reads conservative sites and says he is skeptical of both parties, but on policy issues, he says, he lines up more closely with the Democrats.

Because Crossroads wouldn鈥檛 disclose their targeting strategy, we can鈥檛 know how many other factors may have been involved. Collegio would not say whether the online ad was only sent to viewers in certain states.

Television ads from dark money groups often get significant media scrutiny. When Crossroads GPS launched a television ad in early June attacking President Obama鈥檚 鈥渞eckless spending,鈥� the group鈥檚 $7 million ad buy made headlines in . The Washington Post , and concluded that the ad contained both exaggerations and omissions.

What didn鈥檛 get mentioned, by newspapers or by , was that an online version of the same ad鈥攖he ad Berns saw鈥攚ould appear on the computer screens of select individuals, based on their Internet habits. Collegio said it was 鈥渓ikely an oversight鈥� that the Crossroads press release didn鈥檛 include a description of the online part of the ad campaign. But, he noted, 鈥淲hen we announce online buys, the media rarely report on it.鈥�

By their nature, targeted online ads are harder for news organizations to track, since they are only shown to some users, and will never appear to others.

This makes targeted ads much less transparent than TV ads, and makes it harder to tell if politicians or political groups are using targeting to pander to certain groups of voters, or whether they鈥檙e sending out ads that are misleading, hypocritical, or just plain false.

As part of our campaign coverage, we鈥檝e been asking readers to send in screenshots of any targeted political ads they see. was one of the first to send in screenshots of a targeted ad.

Another targeted dark money ad came from a woman in Wisconsin, who asked that her name not be used. She sent screenshots of a targeted ad from the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity attacking Wisconsin Democratic congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, who is now running for Senate.

The Americans for Prosperity ad on the Washington Post’s site.

The ad, which reads, 鈥淭ell Tammy Baldwin: Wisconsin can鈥檛 afford Washington鈥檚 wasteful spending!鈥� asks viewers to 鈥淐lick here to sign the petition.鈥� The ad appeared on multiple sites the woman visited, including in a prominent place on the home page of the Washington Post. While Americans for Prosperity did not return requests for comment, a Washington Post spokeswoman said a broader Americans for Prosperity ad campaign had been taken down because it had not been approved by the Post鈥檚 advertising team. While many critics of targeting have been concerned that political groups might use targeting to send out controversial ads without attracting attention, that wasn鈥檛 the case with the two ads our readers spotted. The targeted ads from both groups sent the same message as their .

Recent surveys suggest many American aren鈥檛 enthusiastic about political targeting online.

A released this week by the Annenberg School for Communications found that 86 percent of the respondents did not want 鈥渨eb sites to show you political ads tailored to your interests.鈥� Most respondents also said they want to know what the campaigns know about them.

In general, Berns said, 鈥淚鈥檓 fine with targeted advertising. If I鈥檓 going to see ads on the Internet, I鈥檇 rather they be something I鈥檓 interested in.鈥� But, he said, he draws the line at politics.

鈥淚’d much prefer a world where candidates tried to equally hard to reach everyone, present their policies rationally, and let the chips fall where they may,鈥� he wrote in an e-mail.

鈥淭argeting by political viewpoint is 鈥榗reepy,鈥欌�� he wrote. 鈥淎 little too close to propaganda techniques for my comfort.鈥�

Have you seen a targeted political ad?

Help us find out how politicians are targeting you online.

1. If you spot a small blue triangle icon on any online political ad, or the words “Ad Choices,” take a screenshot of the ad.
2. Then click on the blue triangle or the words 鈥淎d Choices鈥� to find out which company showed you the ad. Take a screenshot of that, too.
3. E-mail the screenshots to us at targeting2012@propublica.org. Please include the full URL of the page where you saw the ad.

If the ad asks you to 鈥渓earn more,鈥� visit a website, donate, or sign a petition, please send us a screenshot of that site or petition, as well. (The page where the ad sends you may also be targeted to what advertisers know about you.)

Not sure how to take a screenshot? Here are the instructions if you’re , , or .

You can also check out our , which analyzes how campaigns are targeting voters with different e-mail messages.

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